Glamour Ethics

The Ethics of Glamour
I have been contemplating posting this video for sometime, please watch it before continuing to read this post as much as that might pain some of you.



I saw this music video film in theaters with MChi when it first came out and this song in particular aroused strong feelings in me (and not just the kind of feelings that sparkly tits will arouse in any of us). What it speaks to quite beautifully, i think, is glamour. This scene occurs during the part of the film where the protagonist is dating the rich bad guy and she is receiving expensive gifts from him. Through this relationship, she becomes more independent (spends less time pining over less-rich good guy and actually gets out on the town), more confident (she is more assertive about her career as a dancer and the future of the club) and she adopts this beautiful, sexy new look. Indeed, this musical number opens with "where have I been all my life?" She sings about her alluring, expensive lifestyle and cheekily defends herself against rumours that she is a whore. She persists that she is a good girl. When she persists that she is good, I see myself persisting that a running away to LA to be a burlesque dancer is good. Good as the antithesis to unethical, imperfect, wrong.

Glamour:
hex: cast a spell over someone or something; put a hex on someone or something
glamor: alluring beauty or charm (often with sex-appeal)
http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=glamour

The question that I often come to is "how should I live?" (also "Can you tell me how to get the most out of life?") And to a certain extent, I understand the assertion that "desire is not enough."

But I very strongly desire is the spell-binding power and beauty that I perceive in videos like this one. I struggle with the idea that desire is not enough and that there must be some moral-ethical framework outside an endless cycle of wants. I struggle with the fact that one cannot live inside a music video or a lingerie advertisement (although I dream that I will one day move to Disneyland and disprove this notion by living everyday as a Disney princess - the height of a girlhood image of glamour). It torments me that the fantasy, even when lived for a few moments at a time, is not real. And not only is there conflict between fantasy and reality - but between fantasies themselves. How, exactly can I be a virgin and a whore at the same time? A powerful sorceress and a paper doll?

And what about carpe diem and cultivating my own garden? How are those philosophies opposed to a religious devotion to glamour? Why is this preoccupation vapid?

Although, I do recall my earlier aversion to effigies, which in a way, a fantasy is an effigy. An effigy can become a doppelgänger and I feel as though it begins to do violence to the person it is and image and reflection of. So where does this notion of violence fit in?

I fear I am not making much sense.
Anyways, here's to sparkly tits.
xoxo